I’ve always believed that you have to be an egotistical asshole to be a politician, and I still think that’s by and large true, but one thing about last night’s historic election of Barack Obama to the Presidency was that it was the first time in a very long time that a political event had inspired a positive feeling.

From the beginning it was clear that there was a fantastic opportunity after eight years of Bush, terror alerts, the politics of fear and hatred, war and invasion, that there was a chance that the American public would be ready, in sufficiently large numbers, to change the tone of their political discourse. Probably the only silver lining I can think of to the horrific eight years of Bush’s administration is the fact that it so sickened people that they were ready for a new message, and I would like to thank Barack Obama for consistently sticking to his principles, staying “on message”, and trusting that people would respond.

Hope. It sounds so corny. It’s so cliche. It’s vague and unquantifiable. It sounds like something you say to dodge a tough question instead of answering it. But the truth is that hope has been in extremely short supply in America in the first decade of the new millenium. We started off with the hangover of the dotcom bust, then 9/11, then Iraq and it’s poisonous progeny Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, then the financial meltdown… the hits just kept on coming. Most Americans this year faced higher prices for food and gas and a shrinking economy and with it uncertainty about their job security.

What I am most happy about with the result of this election is not that we may have banished some demons about race relations in America, but that we have chosen, as a country, and convincingly, that we want our leaders to show us a vision we can feel good about, a vision that inspires us to take the hard steps to make reality, and that brings us together in a common cause that is greater than our individual differences.

I have high expectations for Barack Obama, and it may be unfair to pin so much on any one person, but that’s the exceptional leadership quality that he has, and although I wouldn’t be surprised if we are a bit disappointed when the rubber meets the road and reality constrains some of the loftier campaign promises, I will still consider it a net gain that we have turned the corner on hatred and division and fear and have embraced a new way of treating each other.

My best wishes for the future of America and its people.

Let’s examine that last one a bit more shall we?

But first a little background.

So I’m on a business trip in Germany. I’m out with some colleagues having a nice dinner, then a few drinks, and then we go to a place called “the Cave” which is a tiny bar in what looks like a wine cellar with a cute little dance floor and a bartender/DJ with a love of the 80’s and early 90’s.

We’re all having a good time and yours truly decides to go back to his hotel at a respectable 1:00am. It’s a nice cool fall night in Heidelberg as I walk by the cathedral (a feature of most European towns that is sadly missing in most American ones). I get to the hotel, right next to the quaint “Old Bridge”, put my keycard in the door, a procedure that the owner of the hotel assured me would be sufficient to gain access to the hotel after the receptionist has left, and, of course, all it does it beep insultingly back at me instead of unlocking the freaking door.

A bit pissed, I call the hotel (their number is luckily printed on their stationery taped to the door). Naturally, there is no answer. And there is no answering machine. It just rings. And rings. And I stand there, and listen to the rings.

I briefly consider plowing into the door with my shoulder or scaling it like Spider-Man, but discard both options as too likely to either get me in trouble or make me die.

What to do? Know anyone I can call in Heidelberg at 1am to crash at their place?

Yes actually, two people. Both cell phones straight to voicemail.

What next?

Think damn you! You have two college degrees for God’s sake!

I stand there getting cold for a bit, then head back to the Cave. I explain my dilemma to Olaf, my boss. Olaf, saint that he is, says “No problem, you stay with me.” Really? Awesome. Thanks Olaf. What a cool boss. So then we dance for another hour and all go home. I get to bed late, get up early, and get a ride back to my hotel. A quick shower, throw my stuff in my suitcase, and I’m out the door to get to the train station for my train to Frankfurt for the Book Fair.

Fast forward three days.

It’s my last day of the book fair. I am packing all my stuff up because (as usual) I’m running late and need to check out and get to the booth. Where’s my passport? I look everywhere. It’s nowhere. What? WTF? I always keep it in the same place, it should be there. Only it’s not.

I take everything out of my suitcase and go through it. It’s not there. Then my computer bag. Same thing. Okay, now I’m starting to get a little nervous. I’m supposed to be on a plane at 5pm, that’s nine hours away. What the hell am I going to do?

Calls to the hotel in Heidelberg (who so graciously happen to be working at this time of day, fuckers) reveal that I didn’t leave it there. I might have left it at Olaf’s, but there’s no one home for a few more days, so I can’t check. Damn. I really need to be more organized.

What next? I could ditch the book fair, train it back to Heidelberg, taxi to Olaf’s check if it’s there, then somehow get back to Frankfurt, give Olaf back his keys, and get to the airport. Hmm. With all my stuff? And what if it’s not there? Bad plan.

Next plan. I show up without a passport but with a really good story about how the small family-run German hotels are pieces of crap and lie to you about your key opening the door late at night. Hmm. Probably won’t get the sympathy vote. Bad plan.

Next plan. Obviously, I need a new passport. Where would one get a new passport? American embassy. Where’s that? Usually they’re in the capitals. Damn, that’s Berlin. But Frankfurt’s a big city, they might have a consulate or something. Damn, why is it so damn hard to pull up web pages on a BlackBerry? And why do all Government web sites look the same and never have the info you want– ah there it is.

There is a consulate in Frankfurt. Yay! But it’s out in the suburbs? WTF? Grrrr. The consulate does have an emergency passport replacement capability. Yay! But you have to get there before 11:30am. Grrrrr.

Well, at least I have a plan of action.

I get to the Fair with all my stuff. Drop it all off. I have one meeting at 9:30am with some members of an Italian consortium. I consider ditching it, but it’s my only meeting all day and I don’t want word to get to my boss that I didn’t do my part to help the Sales people. I go to the meeting. I wait. The Italians are late. A guy from our company comes in and says, “They are going to be another hour at least, they just got to the main train station.”

See ya.

I’m running through the halls of the Frankfurt Book Fair trying to get to a cab. Damn. Why are these halls never ending and filled with people just strolling along picking free shit up from every stand. What do they think this is!?

Okay, taxi acquired. Feel better. Just have to get to the embassy. I look at my watch the whole way. I get there at 10:49. Sweet. This is going to work.

The fucker behind the three feet of bomb-proof glass tells me I can’t bring my laptop in the embassy. He also tells me that there is no place for me to leave my bag. What!? I have to run down the street about half a mile and there’s a convenience store whre they have lockers.

WHAT!?

*&Q#Efuck%$&*fuck^@#fuck%)(”locker.please.thankyou”)*&Qrun#*&(run($(*&#@$run

I’m back. Soaked in sweat. The security guards, who are all Americans enjoying the sweet life of a Government employee overseas, take their sweet time getting me through the ridiculously tight security (actually, it’s not ridiculous but probably necessary considering how hated we are, which is a shame. Thank you George W. Bush, you fucker).

I FINALLY get to the building where I get my number to see a representative of the US State Department who (after waiting a half hour) I tell my story to: “Lost passport. Flying out tonight. Need replacement.”

It’s surprisingly easy to get a replacement passport, you just fill out two forms and say “I swear” when he asks you if you’re telling the truth. The only tense part was when he looks at his watch and says, “Oh, you better get to Desk 14 to do your payment before they close.” Because, apparently, Desk 14 is the only desk in this whole damn place who can process payments and apparently it’s too much fucking work to do it past 12:30pm. I walk up to Desk 14 and it’s empty.

I am about to become a human nuclear bomb in the middle of my own consulate… when the guy walks in.

“You just caught me.”

Actually, you just narrowly escaped being fried to death in an explosion of a human nuclear bomb and you owe me your life… but whatever.

Pay. Wait. Half an hour later. New passport.

My new passport is really thin. It’s like five pages. “It’s just temporary, you have to get a full replacement back in the states,” the representative of the US State Department tells me.

Whatever. As long as they let me on the plane.

My new passport, besides being ridiculously thin, is also ridiculously new and shiny. My old passport was broken in and beat up and even had extra pages put in it because I ran out of pages to put stamps.

Anyway, the taxi ride back to the Book Fair is considerably less stressful. I walk back to Springer’s ridiculously large booth (spanning three aisles - most booths are half of one aisle). Heather asks me, “So did you get a new passport?”

I look at her nonchalantly.

“Yeah.”

I don’t understand? Why do you hate America? Do you want the terrorists to win?

So… suppressing the hysteria that is creeping into my thoughts, from an objective point of view, I have to admit: this is a really interesting time in history. It’s not quite at the level of something like, oh, say, the Great Depression, but then again, it’s not that far either… and that’s both scary and kind of cool. Like that time I was in a car crash.

It’s the closest to a financial calamity as I’ve ever seen in my life. Granted, I wasn’t obsessively checking my 401k at the time, but even the gas crisis of the 70’s doesn’t appear to have wreaked the same kind of devastation that the current mortgage and credit crisis has caused.

It’s amazing, to think that the entire system is so fragile that something like this can actually happen. The economy as a whole is huge, with many sectors, many industries, all sorts of markets, all conspiring to create value for shareholders… and yet problems in one part of the system can have such immense knock-on effects so as to freeze credit for the entire economy and cause massive nosedive in stock valuations.

Amazing.

I hope we’ve seen the worst of the losses, and my overpaid money managers can spend the next 12 months just building back the money I’ve lost in their funds over the past ten months. But the worst case scenario is pretty frightening, a deep and protracted global economic crisis with high unemployment across the board.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed that the worst is over, and then go and find and shoot whoever it was that came up with the idea of “collatertalized debt” instruments that:

1. Created such a murky picture of who had what amount of bad debt
2. Which led to banks not trusting each other and stopping intrabank lending
3. Which weakened the investment banks (who were too highly leveraged)
4. And drove up the costs of capital
5. Which made normal loans impossible for credit-worthy businesses (and individuals)
6. Which took away all chances for companies to make money
7. Which then led to my 401k losing 30% in 10 months.

As Samuel Johnson said, “Nothing focuses the thinking like a hanging.”

I’m no economist, but I play one in my mundane white-collar fantasies. My economist alter-ego is full of facts and figures, knows the names of economic principles and when they were articulated, can spout off long streams of financial vocabulary on command, and, of course, knows everything. In my dreams, I’m the Bill Gates of economics, I smite all other weaker economists and gorgeous women, suitably impressed, throw themselves at me en masse.

I read the economist. I’ve taken Economics 101 in MBA-school. I own a copy of “Economics for Dummies” (eh) and “The Origin of Wealth” (fantastic). I haven’t become so accountant-like that I can actually entertain myself with a copy of the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal, but still, I have this erudite alter-ego, let’s call him EconoBrian, who likes to pretend he understands the machinations of the world around him as seen through the best of academic filters: economics.

I am a firm believer in science, which makes sense I guess, since I work for a scientific publisher. In school, I really believed that biology and chemistry were giving me the keys to understanding (and therefore in a way, feeling in control of) all life on earth. Reading Hawking’s book made me equally confident that I could grasp, in my tiny brain, the complete structure of the universe. But it wasn’t until I started learning about economics that I truly felt that I understood what drives the world.

My B-school econ professor described economics as: “the study of how people make decisions under conditions of scarcity.” I thought that was elegant enough to commit to memory.

For me, economics explains almost everything that humans do. Sure, there are still some world events that are simply driven by irrational human emotion, but there’s always an economic reality lurking in the background that eventually comes in and asserts itself.

The topic that got me started writing on this blog again is the sorry state of the US economy. Recently, the entire system imploded under the weight of a bunch of bad debt that toppled the investment banking house of cards and is now taking down the entire country to the tune of $700 billion.

It’s a staggering number. It’s hard to really make it present and tangible. It’s so big that its mere utterance was enough to boost the stock market (until the negotiations fell apart thanks to the President’s own party not backing his plan).

I’ve read quite a bit about the bailout, its potential impact on the economy, the various schools of thought about its prudence. I’ve skipped the details of how the politicians want to modify it because honestly, it makes little difference. Just the idea of the Government committing so much treasure to solve this problem should be enough to keep anyone up at night.

From what I’ve read, the theory is pragmatic: put all the bad debt into one place, managed by a party who can afford the losses (e.g. the Government), and the financial system will get back to doing what it does, lending money to spur economic growth.

The talking head economist who gave us the best soundbite was the one who said: “You have to remember, the entire situation’s root cause is the bad mortgage debt.”

The implication here is that if we remove that from the equation, things will get back to normal. Since my 401k has lost 22% so far this year, I certainly hope that’s true. I don’t like someone else’s bad mortgage affecting my future retirement age.

But $700 billion.

What kind of a burden does that create for us?

Well, first of all, it forces us, as a nation, to go further into debt. Bush wants to raise the debt ceiling to 10 trillion. Mind boggling. I, as a citizen of the United States, will need to nearly double the amount I owe the world from $180,000 to around $300,000. The average American household income is $60,000. That’s five years worth of gross salary, just to pay of the debt we have accumulated because we spend more than we earn as a country.

It’s shameful. But no one seems to think so.

We all go about our consumerist lives, as if we can keep buying flat-screen TVs and PlayStation 3’s and iPhones on credit. I have a friend who owes thousands of dollars on credit cards, paying hundreds of dollars a month just in interest charges, and still taking vacations to foreign countries.

The $700 billion bailout scares me. It doesn’t scare me as much as the alternative (a prolonged, deep recession), and I hope it gets passed soon so that we can start on the road ahead. The lesson I hope is learned from all of this is that the financial markets need more regulation (sorry guys, but you fucked it up, and we’d have to be idiots to let you run amok again), and that the country needs to save more and spend less.